About Planet Argon
PLANET ARGON, founded in 2002, is a “full stack” Ruby on Rails web application design, development, consulting, and hosting firm.
PLANET ARGON is located in the beautiful Pacific Northwest’s Portland, Oregon. Also at home in the Portland area is the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and O’Reilly’s Annual Open Source Convention (OSCON), along with local gems such as the Portland Ruby Brigade (pdx.rb), Personal Telco, Free Geek and Powell’s Technical Books. Portland is fast becoming an open source geek’s paradise.
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What We Value
- Collaboration – We believe that an open dialogue between all members of a group helps to produce more reasoned and intelligent decisions.
- Enthusiasm – We recognize the unique power of people who are passionate about their craft. We believe that fun is an essential ingredient in a collaborative and vibrant company culture. We think happy people make better software.
- Community – We are part of many communities. Our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplace, and our professional communities. We give back to our communities by implementing socially responsible business practices and sharing our knowledge and tools with our peers.
- Versatility – We believe that it is important for our team to be open and flexible, as well as the work that we do. This allows us to adapt to change and encourage innovation.
- Execution – We value action and when people make things happen. It is important that we follow through on our commitments, plans, and ideas.
Who We Are
Robby Russell founded PLANET ARGON in 2002. His experience includes seven years as a professional programmer, and (soon) as a published technical writer. Robby’s current project is a Ruby on Rails book, titled Programming Rails, to be published by the leading technical book publisher, O’Reilly Media. This project, in part, stemmed from his Rails related blog, robbyonrails.com. Robby also likes to play music and has a few musical projects in the works.
Allison has been designing usable things for as long as she can remember. Growing up she filled her many sketchbooks with ideas for multi-functional furniture, customizable clothing, and houses that work with the lifestyle of the people who live there. She almost went to school for furniture design, animation, fashion design, and more recently, philosophy, but realized that it wasn’t so much furniture, cartoons, or clothes that she cared about, but thinking about and solving interesting problems. Her favorite thing to do is think about things, especially creating great web apps. See what she is currently thinking about at her (not nearly active enough) blog.
She wrote her first website, Allie’s in Wonderland, at the age of 14. At 16 she won the Independent Means National Young Women’s Business Plan competition for a customizable t-shirt website (and won again the next year for another website idea involving customizable products). Ten years later, Allison is still obsessed with crafting usable things, and takes great pleasure in creating a positive user experience. She also enjoys amassing more books than she will ever have time to read.
After spending many years working in a Microsoft (.NET) environment, Gary decided to follow his growing interest in Ruby On Rails by joining PLANET ARGON. He has been developing software for longer than he would like to admit but less than he wishes he had.
When not at work, he’s most likely to be found on some remote mountain, either speedily skiing downhill or slowly trudging uphill with a backpack. He also has a strong interest in music, playing keyboards, and is involved in various projects that he hopes will one day bring him fame and glory. Last, but not least, is his love for soccer, supporting his hometown club, Liverpool.
You can also find observational notes on his move from .NET to Rails over on his blog.
Chris had an interest in design from a very young age when he enjoyed sketching houses and cars. After receiving his first computer at the age of 14, Chris became immensly interested in the Internet and spent an entire year of his spare time absorbing as much he could from the vast depths of knowledge the Internet had to offer. In this time, he also taught himself HTML and the basics of Photoshop while creating his first website at the age of 15.
9 years later, web design has became Chris’s chosen career path. As a PLANET ARGON interface designer, he puts his design skills to use solving problems and adding the designer’s touch and eye for detail to our development team. When not in the office, Chris enjoys reading blogs and everything relating to design in general. Read more about Chris’s adventures over at his personal blog.
Paige Saez loves to learn new things. She has built bicycles, designed clothes, re-floored houses, built large-scale suspension kite structures, worked at homeless shelters, run her own artists residency program and exhibited artwork all over the world. Paige was raised in Miami, Florida and studied Art & Design at Alfred University in Upstate New York before moving to Portland where she studied Architecture at Portland State University. She is currently studying Interaction Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and loves talking about projects. Paige loves to think about systems science, and is fascinated by collaborative cultures, information architecture and conceptual art. She collects tools and art supplies and can never get enough books. She is fascinated by the future of web apps and dreams of designing killer interactive applications: including a cohesive visual search engine, a visual programming language, and a customizable software bot for her phone. You can follow her new blog here.
Graeme Nelson, aka imperial dune, had a childhood dream to become a jockey. The thought of riding horses all day long just made sense to him. Lucky for Graeme, his dad owned a few thoroughbred horses. But like most careers you can’t start at the top and Graeme realized that he would have to spend several years in training and cleaning up after the horses. Graeme pleaded to be given a chance to ride, but the racing community wouldn’t listen. Graeme wasn’t happy with this answer. Graeme spent several days plotting his revenge on the racing community. Then one day it came to him. He would build a computer program that would predict all the races. He would bankrupt the racing community. After several days to pondering over the situation, Graeme decided he should use his programming talents for goodness. And from that day forth, he vowed he would only use his talents for goodness.
Graeme Nelson in his pursuit of goodness, was happy to stumble upon the Ruby programming language a little over a year ago. It makes him happy. And when Graeme is happy, everyone is happy.
Andy has been surrounded by computers and programming from a young age. His father is a database administrator and his mother is a computer science professor. He graduated from Portland State University with a computer science degree, and has been developing in rails for around a year. In school he worked as a system administrator and is very happy to move to doing development.
As a developer at PLANET ARGON Andy is employing his development skills to solve problems, and design good software. When not programming, Andy likes to commute on his bike, rock climb, and read random pages on wikipedia. You can follow his blog here.
Daniel is the only team member at PLANET ARGON that was born and raised in Oregon, which means that he’s become the local tour guide for the rest of us. Daniel finds satisfaction by aiming to help make the world a happier place to live. He’s a huge proponent of free software and involves himself in several local technology user groups. Despite having the farthest commute of all employees at PLANET ARGON (5.2 miles one-way), Daniel rides his bicycle daily.
As the Lead Administrator of PLANET ARGON, Daniel is responsible for monitoring the health of all our servers and assisting hosting customers with their support issues. Daniel is also known to write about technology on his blog and knows more about rockets than anybody else at the company.
Melissa Severini was born and raised in sunny California but has called Portland, Oregon home for the last 7 years. She has assimilated many of the characteristic traits of a Pacific Northwesterner, most notably webbed feet and a love of the outdoors and outdoor activities. She enjoys hiking, cycling, rock climbing, and backpacking as well as indoor activities like knitting and crafting. In her spare time she volunteers for the American Red Cross and is going to school to complete an undergrad in biology before moving on to something more obscure and exotic.